“And that’s what happened. I walked as long as I could, but then… I don’t know how long I was abandoned before you found me. Now, I belong to you. I will do anything you want, since you own me.”
Adlai had a brief period where he took control of our shared body and he nodded. This was what he naturally expected, and he was looking forward to sharing the nights with her.
He had never been with a woman. The time he had lived with the Essenes taught him that women were to be scorned. When he left the sect, though, he struggled with that and secretly thought about having a woman of his own. Now, one had voluntarily given herself to him.
I put my hands on her cheeks and smiled at her.
“You are free,” I said. “I won’t own you, but you are welcome to travel with me if you wish. If you have some other place you would rather be, that’s fine, too.”
“I have no place and no one.”
“I understand.”
“Please let me come with you.”
We nodded. Adlai wanted to throw her to the ground and fuck her, but I wasn’t allowing any such thing to happen.
“We are going farther up river, to the village of Nazareth.”
“I know of Nazareth.”
“Do you? What do you know of it?”
Shonda seemed uneasy.
“They say…” she said, but then she stopped. Her mouth closed and again, she looked around. She was afraid.
“I will protect you.”
She nodded. “They say the messiah will be there.”
I smiled at her.
“Do you believe them?”
“I want to, but we’ve seen many false messiahs come and go. They all say they are the Chosen One, and they all talk about God’s word and what we must do for Him. They ask for money and for favors.”
“Did your master give them anything?”
She locked eyes with me. “Sometimes he gave them me.”
I wanted to hug her, but I didn’t want to give her mixed signals. She was an abused nineteen-year-old girl who hadn’t had a chance to grow up. All she had been taught was that her body was useful to barter for other things.
“I wish you’d had a different life,” I said.
She nodded. “When the false messiahs were unable to perform the miracles they promised, my master would either throw them out or have them killed. He liked to toy with fakers.”
“And of the one in Nazareth?”
“We heard stories. I don’t believe them any more than I believe the people who begged for money to my master, but some do believe.”
“Did your master believe?”
“I never knew. He was very skeptical, always.”
“What do you know about this messiah in Nazareth? Does he have a name or do you know what he looks like?”
“I know nothing about him.”
We were silent for a moment. That’s when she hugged me. I held her to me and stroked her hair. Then she looked up and her eyes pleaded with me. I only hesitated a moment before kissing her.
Adlai got his wish after all, and we all spent the night sleeping in each other’s arms.
The next morning was bright and sunny, and Shonda’s smile was just as bright, so there wasn’t much we could have asked for to make the day start off better.
I let Adlai do his morning prayer, and Shonda nodded her head silently beside us while he did that.
None of us were really hungry, so we started hiking north, getting as much ground under us before the mid-day scorching sun hit us.
Shonda showed no signs of any weakness or fatigue, which surprised me after she’d been abandoned a week earlier.
Sometime that morning or perhaps the afternoon before, we’d left Judea and wandered into Samaria. That brought us closer to my goal, so when I realized we’d crossed some invisible border, I was happy.
The only thing I wanted to be careful of was the memories that Adlai carried of the Samaritans. They’d always been antagonistic to Jews, so it was best to avoid people if we could manage it. Why start an argument if we didn’t need to?
Shonda walked immediately behind me the entire time and didn’t speak. She’d learned her lessons from her bastard master, and I thought of asking her to walk beside me and feel free to talk, but Adlai wasn’t keen on that. He’d have to be the one to stay with Shonda whenever I headed back to the 21st century, so I didn’t want to rock the boat there.
Samaria grew more mountainous the farther we walked. We stayed in the valley, following the river Jordan, but all around us craggy mountain peaks rose high. I wondered how anybody could live here, but of course my science background knew the answer: life fills every part of the Earth, from the highest mountains to the deepest ocean trenches. Life always finds a way.
Mid-morning, we followed a curve in the river, and we found ourselves face to face with a small group of people. There were maybe twenty men, the same number of women, and about a dozen children.
So much for trying to circumvent contact with the Samarians. I didn’t want to look like we were avoiding them, because that might cause a conflict in its own right, so I walked straight to the group and bowed.
“Greetings. My name is Adlai, and this is Shonda.”
We looked at the group, who all looked vaguely puzzled. Their skins were much darker than ours. One man came closer to me, then looked back at the rest of the group as if to ensure he had permission to speak on their behalf. Nobody seemed to object.
At first, he spoke a bit of Arabic. When I didn’t reply, he spoke in broken Aramaic.
“I am Fadel.”
I pointed to the Jordan. “We are following the river.”
He looked where I was pointing.
Shonda finally said something to me, the first words she had spoken on our hike. “You should trade food.”
“Trade?” At first, I wasn’t sure what she meant.
“They have lamb. And bread.”
Shonda pointed at the piles of food that were being protected by several of the men. I could smell the food and all of a sudden, I craved it. I was getting sick of eating fish.
I smiled at her and nodded.
Fadel watched me carefully as I went to the water and took out my fishing gear. Shonda stayed with him, a hostage to show we meant no harm.
It took only about twenty minutes to catch a half dozen fish. I brought them back to Fadel.
“Please accept.”
Fadel gratefully took the fish and carried them back to his group. He spoke in Arabic with several other men, with them all glancing back to us. I’m sure they didn’t trust us, but they wanted to.
After the discussion, one of the women brought us portions of lamb and bread. We gratefully accepted and also took their offer to sit with them for our meal.
As we ate, I wondered why the Jews of Judea were so leery of the Arabs in Samaria.
I remembered the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible. A man was beaten and left half dead on the side of the road. A priest came by and then a Levite, which I think was an assistant to the priest. They both walked around the man to avoid him.
Finally, a Samaritan walked by and immediately took the beaten man to his home and nurtured him back to health.
The parable is intended to answer the question, “Who is my neighbor?” which is a follow-up to Jesus’s command for all people to love their neighbors. The Samaritan was the one in the story who truly fulfilled that commandment, even though his people despised Jews.
I’d never appreciated that story until the meal I shared with the Samaritans we met.
After we ate, we said good-bye and started walking again, Shonda behind me.
We managed another fifteen miles that day.
The next day, the day I first saw Jesus, we started the morning the same as the two prior ones, praying and walking, stopping to catch fish along the way.